SPUTR

Trick naming

Each trick in the Spammers' Compendium has a friendly name (which is intended to be humourous), and also a SPUTR name. SPUTR (Spam/Phish Uniform Trick Repository) is a naming scheme for spammer and phisher content tricks that was first proposed by John Graham-Cumming. More details can be found here.

Each name consists of three '!'-separated parts: a purpose, a name, and a technology.

The purpose is the reason for the trick (for example, the trick is used to obscure a URL, or to insert innocent words).

The name is derived from the current pejorative name.

The technology identifies the way in which the trick is coded (for example, with HTML or MIME).

Purposes

The following table contains a list of 'purposes' that can be used to categorize tricks.

Inserting a beacon that tells the spammer that a message has been read.

Technologies

For a single name there could be multiple tricks using different technologies (e.g. some tricks might be implemented using HTML or CSS), or tricks that are intended for different purposes (words might be inserted to fool a Bayesian filter or to break a hash).

This table shows the 'technologies' that are recognized in the naming scheme:

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